‘Minx’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: Bath House Blues

Sometimes in life, when your nude male centerfold commits vehicular momslaugher, you have to pivot and take some creative risks. That’s one of the great lessons of this week’s episode of Minx, at least. The other great lesson is, you never know what’s going to end up happening at the bath house.

So, yes, this month’s Minx model ran over his mother with his car, leaving Richie and Bambi scrambling to assemble a new photoshoot as the magazine’s deadline looms. Richie’s been pushing for a bath house shoot all season and it’s been a source of tension between him and Joyce since it’s so gay and not necessarily a hit for their advertisers, but Joyce, Tina, and Constance are at Constance’s retreat in the mountains, Rancho Peregrino, where they’re interviewing potential editors for Minx International’s future outposts and can’t weigh in.

With the women out of the office, Richie drops the bath house idea on Doug. Doug’s been moping around drinking beer and keeping company with his pet bird ever since he found out Tina was promoted to head up Minx International and not him, so not only does he love the bath house idea, he’s excited to help with it. The man just needs a sense of purpose and he thrives!

The magazine has twelve pages to fill, so Richie invites Shelly to the bath house to quickly pen a new Bella LaRouche story, and when she arrives, it’s clear her time in Poughkeepsie has changed her. Gone is her perfectly blown-out hair and her stuffy suburban mom attire, she’s letting her curls dry naturally and she’s rocking pants.

Even though Doug’s supposed to be helping with the photo shoot, he makes a discovery while he’s in his office – he pieces together several torn paper scraps from his trash can which show that Connie is planning to dissolve Bottom Dollar Productions. It’s such a big blow that he heads to the woods to tell Tina about it. “Connie is a butcher, Teens! She’s just being nice to our faces. She’s fattening us up so she can unload us!” he says. “She’s going to fuck us!”

“You been drinking with your bird again?” Tina asks.

If Constance wanted to just unload Minx, why is she going through the trouble of auditioning all of these editors, making them scavenge for food in the woods and prove themselves to her, Tina wonders. Well, she’s no help! Doug finds Joyce to pass on his theory that Connie’s planning to dismantle their media empire and she also blows him off, essentially saying that’s why they brought Connie in, to be their head of business and make these kinds of decisions. However, this plants a seed of suspicion in Joyce’s mind, especially as she grows concerned that the editors Constance favors aren’t right for the Minx brand. Joyce has been struggling to accept her new public identity as the face of the sexual revolution – that Rolling Stone cover really messed with her self-perception after all – and she starts to wonder if this, the women’s fashion and Vogue-like vibe – is the direction she wants her brainchild to be taking.

Doug skulks around Connie’s house, snooping in her drawers and finally finds real proof, not just a torn up paper, that she plans to dissolve Bottom Dollar. He’s devastated that the company he built is about to be scrapped, but when he returns to tell Tina about what he’s found, she’s not sympathetic. “Maybe Bottom Dollar has outlived its usefulness,” she tells him.

Because Bottom Dollar never actually did anything for Tina – she worked for Doug for ten years with no promotion, and for what? Now that Connie’s in charge, she’s getting promoted and being seen, and she’s not mad at that. The subtle shift we felt in last week’s episode when Tina announced her new job and Doug opted not to propose has now officially become a chasm. “You’re choosing Constance over me,” he tells her, and she corrects him, “No. I’m choosing me over you.” Doug and Tina’s relationship was always a power struggle, and yet, they seemed so great together. But now that Tina’s ready to be the higher-status one in the relationship, it’s all falling apart.

Back at the bath house, things aren’t coming together creatively the way that Richie had hoped – but just as the models find their light and he finally hits his groove, a siren goes off. The bath house is violently raided by the cops, and his beautiful tableau of Greek god-like bodies perched in the water is broken as the models scatter and are pinned down and arrested. (“The pigs need a bath, too,” Bambi tells a confused Shelly, who gets disoriented in the kerfuffle.)

Bambi and Shelly hide out in a sauna and, since they’re basically locked in, hiding from the police, Shelly can’t escape for once. She’s avoided Bambi as long as she could, knowing what Bambi brings out in her, but the two are so different from the people they were when they first hooked up. Shelly’s finally embracing her Sapphic yearnings, while Bambi opens up about how she’s longing to find her purpose, her place at Minx. She’s been cast aside and taken for granted ever since the regime change that brought Connie in, and no one has ignored her more than Shelly, the one true friend she thought she had. “You called all the shots in our relationship, and then you’re the one who said you wanted to be friends and then you totally pulled away,” Bambi tells Shelly. “You just see the Bambi that you invented! Everyone does that to me. I’m done pretending.”

“Me too,” Shelly says. I can’t wait to see what happens once they unleash their true selves on the world.

All this happens as the police raid rages on outside their door. Richie, bewildered at first, grabs his camera and starts photographing the chaos and violence. He wanted a bath house scene, and he sure got one.

As the episode concludes, a previously writers-blocked Shelly lets her husband Lenny read her latest Bella LaRouche story. In it, Bella comes out as a lesbian, and Shelly looks at Lenny with anticipation as he reads it. Bella, a.k.a. Shelly, is not a swinger, she’s not in a “sophisticated” relationship with her husband, no, she’s ready to name the thing that’s been nagging for the past year. She’s gay.

What does it mean for her marriage? What does Connie’s corporate deception mean for Minx? Will the bath house raid make it into the pages of Minx? Only one more episode left to find out.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.